County unveils sex offender email alerts

San Diego  County officials unveiled a new email subscription service Wednesday that helps the public keep closer tabs on sex offenders in neighborhoods, but they remain frustrated by a state law that prevents easier access to the information.

Ideally, the email alerts would include the names, photos and other details about sex offenders. But state law prohibits the public dissemination of such specifics when it comes to sex offenders, forcing the county to scale back its pilot program.

The county’s free notifications instead alert residents to a change in their neighborhood and prompt users to check the state’s Megan’s Law sex offender database, where specific information about offenders is stored.

County Supervisor Bill Horn, who represents the North County, expressed disappointment Wednesday that the service isn’t all it could be, but said it was still a step in the right direction.

“We get so busy in our daily routines that we aren’t checking the Megan’s Law website as often as we should,” Horn said at a news conference at sheriff’s headquarters in Kearny Mesa.

The Megan’s Law site, launched in 2004 by the California Department of Justice, does not have a feature to update users when sex offenders change addresses, and instead depends on the public to actively seek out the information.

Horn, who called the Megan’s Law site “too passive,” began looking for a more proactive way to educate the public about sex offenders in 2010, following the killings of Amber Dubois of Escondido and Chelsea King of Poway. The teenagers were attacked in separate incidents by sex offender John Gardner III, who is serving a life sentence in prison.

“San Diego County has faced too many of these tragedies in our past as the result of violent sexual predators we have in our midst,” Horn said.

Users can sign up for the email alerts at SanDiegoCountySexOffenders.com and enter numerous ZIP codes to be tracked, such as home, school, work, day care or a relative’s house. Emails will then be sent out whenever there is a change to that area, and it is up to the user to recheck the list of offenders on the Megan’s Law site to determine what exactly has changed.

The process isn’t exactly streamlined, but it helps get the community more engaged, said Sheriff Bill Gore.

The program cost nearly $20,000 to develop and is expected to cost the Sheriff’s Department another $2,400 a year to manage. The software was designed by The Omega Group, the same San Diego-based company behind Crimemapping.com, a crime statistic database for the public.

Similar email alerts are already available from various national private and nonprofit organizations, sometimes for a fee.

Horn said he still has hope that the state law preventing the dissemination of specifics about sex offenders will be overturned.

He and then-Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher of San Diego had proposed a bill that would allow local governments to release such detailed notifications, but it was killed in 2011 by the Assembly Appropriations Committee, which cited the potential for high one-time costs “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The committee wrote that while the bill wouldn’t actually require the state to do these notifications, it would create significant pressure on the state to do so.

The committee also noted the reasoning behind the law in the first place, which is to prevent harassment of sex offenders and to make sure the website is a regulatory effort, not a punitive one.

But Horn said the law “protects the wrong people.”

San Diego County has roughly 5,200 registered sex offenders whose movements are tracked and enforced by the state, as well as by a task force made up of local agencies.

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Tim Curran said a disclaimer on the sheriff’s email system warns against using the information to intimidate or harass sex offenders.

“This site is solely intended to protect our children,” Curran said.

San Diego defense attorney Kerry Armstrong, who specializes in sex crimes, doubts the overall usefulness of such an alert system. It can provide a false sense of security, he said.

“Just because you know a sex offender is in your neighborhood, does that really make you safer?” Armstrong said, adding that people can walk, drive or bike anywhere they want to commit crimes. “I don’t understand why we treat some criminals different from others. Why not email alerts for someone released from parole who committed murder or robberies? ... To me, it’s just singling one type of offender out, and it’s not fair to a lot of guys trying to get their lives back on track.”

• Click on the Megan’s Law link, follow the disclaimers, and enter your zip code to view sex offenders in your area. You can print out the listing of offenders for future reference, and compare the list to updated ones when you are alerted of changes.